COSMIC STRINGS ARE CURRENT-CARRYING

A synthesis of previous work done on the microscopic structure of cosmic strings in realistic models is made and reveals that strings are expected to be not only superconducting in the sense of Witten, but also generically current-carrying, either at the GUT scale or at the electroweak scale. This applies to any GUT string forming model leading to the standard electroweak theory as a low energy limit. The current consists of charged vector bosons. Cosmological consequences are briefly discussed.